Let's hear it for people with vision and ambition and, well, balls. There's a brilliant video of Magnetic Man (dubstep overlords Skream, Benga and Artwork) on YouTube playing this live. The crowd look pie-eyed and sweaty, pushing their hands towards the ceiling while the trio stand inside a huge, neon-lit cage cranking out wobble-friendly niceness. There are eye-burning lights and lasers and people sitting on mates' shoulders and you think, "Jesus. Those bastards are having an amazing time …" And they clearly are. Meanwhile, MM's reason for existing is to take the underground music they love to, literally, everyone. To do so they will need Big Choons. Luckily, I Need Air is so monstrous it has to be brought in by sea. Brilliant record.

Caitlin is what awful music-industry types would describe as The Complete Package: she writes and plays and sings grippingly emotional country-folk; she is fuck-you cool; and she is – let's be honest here – hot like the fires of hell to boot. For The Rabbits takes an unremarkable theme – relationship breakdown – and via lines like, "Why is your love like rubber, he said, or gum stuck under my shoe? Leaving it there to avoid the risk of, making a mess out of you …" makes it remarkable. Oh, and she was just 16 when she wrote it. Major star alert.

On first look you will think, "Preeya Kalidas is delightful, but she's no Gaga." Then, starting at 0:54 she (appears to) sing, "You got to keep your eyes on me, watch me while I take a pee …" so perhaps there's some hope for her yet.

The smart thing about Gorillaz is that the best track on Plastic Beach is the one that has no guests, no funny bits, no expansive plans at all. It's just Damon, singing an upliftingly sad song over a track that sounds like it took him as long to write it as it did to play it. Not a track to wow a festival, for sure, but it will joyfully crush your heart via any other way you care to experience it this summer.

There's nothing quite like singing a song about becoming a robotic, unfeeling automaton driven crazy by "the machine" in a robotic, automaton-like voice, is there? Or is that Marina's normal voice? Either way this is dreadful, a record utterly devoid of even the tiniest enjoyable bit.

The most needlessly uncomfortable interview I ever conducted was with Mason's old group, the Beta Band. Or was it Death In Vegas? Anyway, I'm pre-programmed to dislike him. However, this single – and the Boys Outside album it comes from – is absolutely beautiful, a driftingly melodic, indolent daydream of a thing.